BELOW IS THE OLD MOD THAT PATCH 9 KILLED - You want the one in the new thread now. :-D

EDIT : For the time being, the latest patch (patch 9) seems to disable this "fix". It was great while it lasted... /EDIT

Mod Note:As this is not an actual Bug, it got moved to the Hardware section, as it pertains more for those that wants to hack the software to use DirectX 10 cards to run the Hangar Module, which is NOT supported by CIG. Do it at your own risk, there will be no support and any abnormality you find will not be taken seriously as it's not designed to work with DX10.

However I understand there are fair amount of people still stuck with old hardware unable to run the Hangar Module, so we'll keep this sticky here for a few days for people to catch on the trick, before it gets lost in the forum.

*Thank you, that was the point - I didn't want to have to upgrade at this moment and would prefer to put it off until dogfighting or as late as possible. I wasn't originally sure which section to post this in - and figured it'd get the most initial views by the people that needed it the most from within the Hanger section, but I'm fine with it being moved to Hardware. I did bounce it around for a little bit myself as well. And thanks for the sticky - I'm honoured.*

----------------------------------TLDR: I know it's wordy - But you can skip to 'Here are the steps:'----------------------------------

I got to thinking...

If the massively detailed CryEngine SDK editor 'Jungle level' can run in DirectX11 mode on my NVidia GTX 295 - a DirectX10.1 card, then why can't the Star Citizen hangar?

Microsoft did a very good thing in DirectX 10.1 to make it a bit more future-proof.Any new DirectX features from a higher DirectX version - otherwise known as a higher 'feature_level' can be software emulated.

Starting with Windows 7 there have been drivers capable of using a graphics feature called 'WARP' to enable such emulation.

WARP is built in starting with Windows 7, though if you 'are' running Windows 7 - you will need to install the 'Platform Update for Windows 7' update from Microsoft to enable running games that use DirectX 11 features.(Check if you have it installed first, if not, the download link is here)

Windows 8 (built in already) also adds WARP support for version 11.1 and 11.2

Anyway, I fiddled around for a bit, checking dll dependencies, extracting packages and scripts to see what makes it tick.

After a couple days I eventually figured out that it's actually quite a simple matter to fix which surprisingly enough doesn't require the modification of any StarCitizen files produced by CIG, so therefore should even be perfectly 'legal' in regards to the EULA.

I get quite nice framerates on 'Medium' - and can even run well at 'Very High' quality. (Edit: Avg 24fps on Medium)I get much better framerates on my GTX295 than I do on my work machine with its professional grade NVidia Quadro 4000 DX11 card.I actually didn't even notice any real differences between the DX11 card and my DX10.1 card so the Warp driver was doing a good job.

I want to make sure it's known I'm not saying that CIG was lying when they said it's DX11 only. It IS a DX11 only game. DX10 will not be officially supported and it won't get quite as good of framerates via WARP (though it's pretty freaking fast) and it may not continue to work in the future after further development and patching, but it at least for now it lets me enjoy my ship and hangar like everyone else.

I'd love to be also be able to test it out with something more complex like a Freelancer or something that would bump up the hanger size, butsince I don't have the funds for any extra ships (my wife and daughter come first), I've only tried this with my 315p in the 'Discount hangar'.

Here are the steps:

Install the newest CryEngine SDK (or get these files from someone that has it installed - the files to copy from here are about 10MB total)CryDev SDK Download Link

OR

Speedier alternate download location - http://yadi.sk/d/H3Tn8Vwk8rGbA - Thank you @Kangarad1.I have personally verified the files hosted on September 7 2013 as matching my versions using WinMD5 (www.winmd5.com) and have put the expected filehash under the filenames below for you to verify them yourself after the download if you wish.

Here is the most important stepCopy the following files from the SDK 'CryEngine\Engine' directory (or download location) into your 'StarCitizen\CitizenClient\Engine' directory.

It may or may not be due to WARP, but I had been playing around with it and figured there was a good chance it was related. Since I don't have another WinXP or Vista system or a pure DirectX 10 only card to try on (mine is 10.1) - I wasn't 100% sure.

As far as I can tell in my research - The WARP driver will send only the features it can't handle to the cpu for software rendering - which yes is slower, but it's only a part of the rendering being handled this way. You still get to use the full power of the card. It technically allows you to run a DX11 game without even having a graphics card, but it'd be stupidly slow.

There 'is' a supported graphics card check built into CryEngine that has a list of Crysis supported cards - the list is actually 3 txt files in one of the pak files. If your card doesn't match one of these it will ask you if you wish to continue anyway. Hitting 'Ok' will try to use what you have, but is not guaranteed.

I'll try doing a framerate test, but it looks like I'm not just getting way more than a measly 16fps.Medium is nice and smooth. I've had other DX10 games stuttering before and Star Citizen is running great.

It has to still be using my card in some regard as it even runs quite well on 'Very High 1920x1080' - which I know for sure is way too taxing for it to be handled in a pure cpu/software render mode.

It also heats up my card which shows it's doing something and not all cpu rendering.Do watch your card temps - I'm not liable for any meltdowns - mine got to around 90 degrees, but that's not really uncommon for this card.

It still could be the combo of WARP and the possibility that not many DX11 only features have been used by CIG yet or it could be that the cached shaders are allowing Shader level 4.0.

Edit: Checking against the original files - I now have a StarCitizen\CitizenClient\USER\Shaders\Cache\D3D10 directory - so it 'is' enabling DX10 shaders along side any WARP capabilities used.

Either way - I get to enjoy the hangar now and can put off a new card purchase until later in the development cycle.

Note: If anyone has a way to attach files to this forum or safe verified way to get just the two files out to everyone it would probably help a lot of people - the SDK 1.5GB download 'is' a bit excessive, but in my opinion still worth it.

**** Even better is if CIG added these two files into their next hanger patch - it'd probably only take a couple seconds to do it as I'm sure they have the SDK floating around on a hundred machines over there. They still don't have to support DX10 in the future, but at least it could work for us as long as possible.

Thank you for all the MVP recommendations - we'll see what CIG decides - though either way it's really appreciated.

This all just started out as 'I want to see my ship dang it!!'The persistence paid off after a few days, because as soon as I saw the loading screen actually pop up I was ecstatic and knew I just HAD to share it with all you 'guys and gals in the verse'.

I'm glad to be a part of such a courteous, intelligent and just plain awesome community.

---------------------------------------------

Awesome!!! MVP

Thanks everyone, for the nominations and support.

And a great big thank you to CIG for all the hard work and the wonderful things you've done to provide all of us with an experience that's so more than just a game.

We all appreciate it.

See you all in the Verse!

------------------------------------------

Hey cool, looks like there's a contest going on for the best MVP each month.

Voting will be the end of September / first week of October (the week before the first October MVP) - keep an eye on this thread.

I just wanted to say thank you. I completely understand why the team is requiring DX11 cards, and having messed around with the Hangar Module on my brother's rig it's totally worth it and I'm absolutely going to be building a new rig just for this game...

...But even if I have to drop settings to minimum, it's still nice to be able to run the Hangar on my GTX260. I feel like a tester now. Thank you so much!

Does not matter... when the game will be ready it have have many Dx11 features that what you did it will not work...

+ if you have 50 ships fighting in space your card would not be able to cope anyway :D

Perhaps you don't understand how software emulation works. This solution only works properly because DX10.1 includes the ability to emulate future DX features, which is exactly what it's doing. It's emulating the DX11 calls that the Hangar Module is making in software.

You are correct that DX10 cards in general may not be able to cope with the final game, but as we aren't even close to an Alpha this solution is a wonderful stopgap measure to allow more people to test out the modules.

I have a Freelancer and a GTX260 card on my desktop. I'll let you know how it works out. My brand new laptop is DirectX 11 compatible, but can barely run the hangar, so I'm really looking forward to seeing my sexy ship in all its glory. :)

Edit: Eeeeeeee! It worked! It feels a smidgen on the sluggish side (I haven't tried running Fraps), but that could also be because I was just playing a game where I'm running around with speed boosts half the time. It is SO nice to not feel like I'm wading through molasses on the laptop. :) Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Edit 2: I just changed my settings from Low to Medium to High, and it still has the same amount of sluggish-feeling, so I'm going to chalk that one up to being speedy less than 10 minutes ago. (Vroom.)

Well, of course you get better framerates than with a Quadro. The firmware and drivers on that (unsurprisingly) optimise it for tasks far different to gaming. I'd be surprised if your 295 ended up being slower, when it's a) more powerful in hardware terms and b) using a less demanding version of DirectX.

Does not matter... when the game will be ready it have have many Dx11 features that what you did it will not work...

+ if you have 50 ships fighting in space your card would not be able to cope anyway :D

Perhaps you don't understand how software emulation works. This solution only works properly because DX10.1 includes the ability to emulate future DX features, which is exactly what it's doing. It's emulating the DX11 calls that the Hangar Module is making in software.

You are correct that DX10 cards in general may not be able to cope with the final game, but as we aren't even close to an Alpha this solution is a wonderful stopgap measure to allow more people to test out the modules.

Oh, it's a software renderer? No wonder it's so slow. I figured it was just doing the DX11 calls in software and the rest in hardware. This is definitely just a stopgap for people who want to monkey with the hangar module, then. Time to build a new rig!

It's a nice temporary fix, but D3D10 card owners will still need to upgrade at some point.

WARP cannot do Direct3D 11 calls in software, because a lot of D3D 11 functionality resides in the shader pipeline, You cannot replace parts of it with software: either you pull out the whole thing, or you leave it.

WARP works by doing some Just-In-Time ocmpilation of x86 code, which means it will, while running, create new code from the application in order to make it run faster. It will use SSE and any other feature it can from your processor in order to get a good framerate. But it will never leverage your graphics hardware. Not even DirectCompute. The reason for this is that it is supposed to be used as a reference for developers. So even if the developer does not have D3D 11.2 features available in hardware, they should be able to tell if they are implementing it correct or not. Good performance in WARP should equal good performance in hardware.

The old software renderer (<= D3D 9) was called Software Rasterizer. It was so slow it was useless for any purpose except for driver developers. WARP is significantly faster.

I was able to get it into the hanger without an issue. I tested various resolutions and detail levels. I was smooth on High with only small stuttering (nothing to make it unplayable) on Very High. I also had slight stuttering on 1920x1080 resolution but anything below that was just fine.

I know it is just a Band-Aid but it is an awesome one for us that don't have a good enough computer at the moment. Thanks again for this awesome fix!

Does not matter... when the game will be ready it have have many Dx11 features that what you did it will not work...

+ if you have 50 ships fighting in space your card would not be able to cope anyway :D

Perhaps you don't understand how software emulation works. This solution only works properly because DX10.1 includes the ability to emulate future DX features, which is exactly what it's doing. It's emulating the DX11 calls that the Hangar Module is making in software.

You are correct that DX10 cards in general may not be able to cope with the final game, but as we aren't even close to an Alpha this solution is a wonderful stopgap measure to allow more people to test out the modules.

As long as those testers don't, y'know, complain about frame rates or graphical glitches or anything...

I was able to get it into the hanger without an issue. I tested various resolutions and detail levels. I was smooth on High with only small stuttering (nothing to make it unplayable) on Very High. I also had slight stuttering on 1920x1080 resolution but anything below that was just fine.

I know it is just a Band-Aid but it is an awesome one for us that don't have a good enough computer at the moment. Thanks again for this awesome fix!

can't really believe... what hangar you run? discount hangar 1 ship? then it might be possible, just have compare-values from business hangar in a high-end system

I was able to get it into the hanger without an issue. I tested various resolutions and detail levels. I was smooth on High with only small stuttering (nothing to make it unplayable) on Very High. I also had slight stuttering on 1920x1080 resolution but anything below that was just fine.

I know it is just a Band-Aid but it is an awesome one for us that don't have a good enough computer at the moment. Thanks again for this awesome fix!

can't really believe... what hangar you run? discount hangar 1 ship? then it might be possible, just have compare-values from business hangar in a high-end system

Believe! However yes, I am in the Discount Hanger with 1 ship and no, I am not exaggerating my playability. I fully understand that if I probably buy one more ship and upgrade the Hanger, I will be running much slower. But for now I am happy with the results. :)

It's a nice temporary fix, but D3D10 card owners will still need to upgrade at some point.

I think most of us DX10 card owners realize we will have to upgrade at some point. Currently, all the games I want to play run fine on my card. I'm waiting until closer to game release before I upgrade, because I really don't see the point in doing an upgrade now, then possibly having to do another one later.

As I understand this, this is not running on pure WARP. With pure WARP it should not be able to run with more than 10 FPS on the fastest CPUs. So the two PAK files somehow make the CryEngine able to run DirectX 11.0 on part on DirectX 10.1 hardware and parts emulated with WARP. Just what I had in mind in the other thread - who had thought it would be so easy?

I think most of us DX10 card owners realize we will have to upgrade at some point. Currently, all the games I want to play run fine on my card. I'm waiting until closer to game release before I upgrade, because I really don't see the point in doing an upgrade now, then possibly having to do another one later.